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If you are not familiar with her, she does work on the hard board sold by Ampersand – used to be called claybord but is now “Aquabord”. She took a lot of time with us to explain how she used the boards, gave us her business card and said to give her a call if we had any questions!
It took us a while to get around to using the boards we purchased, but finally we have. We set up our own “painting challenge” – we would use the same photo but interpret it any way we wanted. I chose to use the photo pretty much “as is” (gee, that should come as no surprise to you!) while she chose to crop the photo top and bottom and create a horizontal painting. She also decided to tape the painting (this means using masking tape as the resist, rather than miskit) while I chose to use a bit of miskit at the beginning.
Here is mine. (The photo is from my daughter’s trip to Italy a few years ago, and I’m not sure where this was taken – and when I asked her the other day she didn’t know either – so I’m guessing Venice???)
Venetian Alley, 16x20, watercolor on Claybord
I miskited a few areas on the tops of the roof, the sunlight on the ground in the foreground and around the bush area and the figure. Then I got out some sedimentary colors and began slopping on paint, very water-y. I wanted the warmer colors in the center and focal area and then the cooler colors to surround that.
I should probably tell you the colors I used – (all colors are Daniel Smith) – Raw Sienna, French Ultramarine, Cerulean, Azurite, Sodalite, Prussian, Quin. Coral, Venetian Red, Lunar Red Rock, Quin. Sienna, Tiger’s Eye, Tiger’s Eye Burnt, Undersea Green.
I like to glaze, and had read that was possible to do on the board, but at first I found it to be hard not to pull up the underlying color, even using a very soft brush. (One of the features of the board is that, like Yupo, it’s possible to wipe back to the white of the board, which means that the paint is very lift-able). Seems like the following day it was OK – I’m thinking that even though it felt dry at first, it takes that surface longer to get totally dry. (Things to learn about!)
I’m happy with it. You can’t tell in the photo, but up close there is a lot of texture on the left building and cobbles, just due to the nature of the paints. I did not use anything else to create texture.
Here is my friend’s painting – she had some trouble with the paint creeping under the tape, but that is pretty normal for the taping technique.
Let me know what you think!